Authors: Dorothy West
The dream Gram dreamed was to lie beside her forebears, in the white-only graveyard of her kith and kin, far from the cruel North with its stubborn earth that would not open on a winter’s day, casting aside the dead indignant body for a softer day, making death indecent, postponing its appointed hour with the dust from which it came, to which it was entitled to return.
There was so little Gram asked of life, just a way to go home to die. There was so little life had let her hold on to except sorrow. The only thing she had salvaged from the blessings that were hers at birth was the Shelby blood that pumped so slow, so thin a stream through her veins that now it gave no comfort to her weary heart.
She had been awake since dawn, snatched out of sleep by the smell of death on the sighing wind coming through the window, that smell like no other, a smell so faint that only the knowing know it, and too unmistakable to be mistaken. No way to describe it, no earthly way. Only imagery could
give some kind of sense to it: it was like white carnations torn from their growing to wither and die in a dead embrace.
Gram had got out of bed and knelt beside it to pray. She had not been down on her knees in years, the way there and back being too long, too perilous. But she wanted to humble herself before God so that He would see that her faith surmounted her frailty.
Our Father, who art in heaven, Gram prayed with pious hands, there is death in the Oval. The spread of its wings will darken the sky and cast a shadow on the house intended. You know, as I do not, whose turn it is to enter into the glory of Thy kingdom. Don’t let it be me. I am not ready. Once I was ready, and You did not see fit to take me. You sent me to live in a foreign land, You set me down in the midst of strangers and savages. I bore my burden, I never complained.
My back is bent with the burden of living colored. Lift it from me in my last days. Make my great-granddaughter Your instrument. She’s marrying a man true white. Put it in her listening mind to live like white. Put it in her loving heart to carry me home to die. With all her life before her, she won’t refuse her poor old Gram with all her life behind her.
I don’t mean to meddle in the mystery of Your ways, O Lord, but they say Addie Bannister is doomed to die. If You want Addie Bannister, her house is down the road a way. I know the choice is Thine, not mine. But I wanted You to hear my side. Praise God for His goodness. Amen, amen.
Gram had got up off her knees, struggling up in obstinate sections, one hand clutching her cane, the other the
bedpost, rising halfway, and a hand not holding, trying again, and a foot slipping sideways, another try and her cane caught fast in a fold of her gown, and Gram not knowing what was holding her down until she heard a ripping sound, then one major try with what strength was left to try, and this time Gram standing erect at last, her heart thumping hard, her head shaking a little, her eyes dark-ringed with exhaustion, and her sighs and groans half pain, half exasperation at a body too old to do anything easily.
And having risen, she tottered to her chair by the window to sit down and rest from it, her course well charted by things she could hold on to. For everything in Gram’s room was firmly rooted to the floor, table and chair legs in rubber cups that resisted any pushing, the mats secured with metal tape that would not slide with a stumbling foot.
She wished she had her old rocking chair. She would like to rock herself back and forth, back and forth until sleep came to shorten the time of waiting for full day. But they had taken her rocking chair away because its motion might tip her or its rockers trip her. Oh, it was a hard thing to have a rag-doll body that the undiminished mind had such trouble to control.
The morning song of the birds began, not as sustained or full-throated or thrilling as their spring song, but still a summer canticle of runs and trills from a variety of participants, the chewink, the chickadee, the purple finch, the bobolink, the robin, and the blue jay, whose two flute notes in praise of the rising sun were in such contrast to his two harsh cries of warning when danger stalked the park. The mourning doves grieved in the tallest oaks, and their sad, droning utterance,
repeated over and over, by its very monotony set Gram’s head nodding in sleep.
She stirred at a peal of laughter coming from Lute’s little girls. She blinked her eyes and saw Jezebel coming straight as a die, and knew what she was coming for, and what they would give her, a plateful of food, with enough solid meat on that plate to have put solid flesh on Josephine when enough to eat might have meant the difference between her holding on and her giving up.
That heartbreak daughter, Josephine, inheriting her father’s frail spirit and the despair he had died of more than he had died of pneumonia, because he could not cope with the new society of rich white trash in which his kind had been dispossessed, Josephine could not cope with her hunger, too far removed in time and thinking from the great plantation Xanadu to be nourished by Gram’s memories that were the elixir that kept Gram alive.
Josephine knew that marriage to a man who could feed her was her only escape from the terrible trap of genteel poverty. But there was no one to marry her. The few men she knew, had they proposed to her, had only their names to offer her, which were worth no more than hers as cash across a meat counter. The men with money were white trash, who had robbed the aristocrats of their sovereignty, and she would rather marry a colored man who knew he was dirt beneath her feet.
This choice between two evils was merely a figure of speech. Josephine was sure she would die an old maid with her bones sticking through her skin. Her prophecy came true prematurely. She almost died at seventeen of the stored-up
hunger that raged inside her like a fire, consuming her senses, since there was nothing else to feed on.
Black Melisse, born at Xanadu, nursed with Gram at the same mammy’s breast, heard that Miss Caroline’s daughter, Miss Josephine, was bedded with fever. Melisse and Gram had played together as children, Melisse calling Gram “Ca’line” until she could handle a bigger mouthful, “Miss Ca’line,” which she swallowed without difficulty or distaste, accepting it, along with Gram, as in accordance with God’s master plan.
That they saw little of each other after their marriages was mostly because Melisse did not wish to intrude on Gram’s poverty, which was no greater than her own but more hopeless because there was no hope for it.
Melisse cooked for the new rich, branching out into catering. She began to make money, and she saved it to send her son North to college when he was grown enough to go, wanting him out of the overturned South, where decent colored people took orders from white scum who, before the war, could not have set foot on Xanadu without being horsewhipped off it, with Melisse and Miss Caroline up in the tree house laughing fit to kill at those big splay feet kiting it back to the hills.
Melisse, looking at her fine big son, full of her good cooking, wished she could skim off some of his fat and put it on Miss Caroline’s poor puny child, but she knew Miss Caroline would not appreciate this layer of black on white.
That son, Hannibal, was nineteen when Melisse sent him to Miss Caroline’s back door with a great silver tray, covered with a snowy napkin cleaner than Gram could ever
wash a napkin, with each fragrant dish containing food the like of which Gram had not tasted since Xanadu, and Josephine had never tasted at all.
Melisse had put the proper, respectful words in Hannibal’s mouth, had coached him in humility. “Miss Ca’line, I’m Hannibal, ma’am, Melisse’s boy. Mammy heard tell how Miss Josephine was poorly. She sent this tray to tempt her. Says it tastes a heap better than the mud pies y’all used to make in the good days. Says she knows your hands are full nursing Miss Josephine. Says she’d be proud to relieve you of cooking long as Miss Josephine needs you to wait on her.”
He did not see Miss Josephine that day, and it never occurred to him to wonder what she looked like. She was quality, and if his mother chose to feed her because she was, he had no quarrel with her kindness, and not much interest in it either.
When Miss Josephine was strong enough for an outing, Melisse put Hannibal in a coachman’s coat and hat, set him in the driver’s seat of a hired rig, with a picnic basket beside him, and sent him round to take Miss Caroline and Miss Josephine for a ride in the country.
They drove out to Xanadu. Twice a week they took the same drive, for there was nowhere Gram wanted to go except back in time. Hannibal, with his back to the ladies, almost never seeing Miss Josephine face to face, let alone eye to eye, except when he helped her in and out of the carriage, or passed her things out of the picnic basket, like a waiter, never sitting, never eating until the ladies were through, Hannibal fell in love.
He really fell in love with the past. He, who could never have played any romantic part in it, fell in love with Gram’s long-winded stories about Xanadu, which the Yankees had gutted before she was seven, so that her telling was an enlargement of everything.
Hannibal listened spellbound, but Miss Josephine, refusing to listen, thought about Hannibal going up North, and jealously wished she was going, too, anywhere, out of this dead dream that no telling could revive.
Gram should have been disturbed by Hannibal’s inability to utter one coherent word in Miss Josephine’s presence. The only thing Gram thought about Hannibal’s thick tongue was that it was idiotic of Melisse to think more schooling would improve it. The Yankee scoundrels would take his money and cast him forth into the world with books only half understood in his head, and no skills at all in his hands.
But there was no one to train the Hannibals in the things they should know. Those who could have helped them to be what they were born to be could not afford their keep. In these changed times, what was to become of the Hannibals? Gone were the good masters, who cared for them like children all their lives.
Riding in the carriage supplied by Melisse, Gram felt concern for the future of Melisse’s son. That their futures were entwined did not enter her mind; she would have had to be out of her mind for such a thought to flash across it.
It was years before such a thought crossed Hannibal’s, years of separation from Miss Josephine and Miss Caroline, during which they both grew thin as paper. Gram, born rich,
born an inheritor, had this proud knowledge to sustain her. Miss Josephine, born poor, born without expectation, had nothing but the hunger that was destroying her.
What kept her from going mad were Hannibal’s letters to Melisse. Melisse came once a week to hear them read, bringing a treat—a pecan pie, a three-tiered cake. She had no excuse for bringing anything as nourishing as a bowl of stew, though the skin and bones of the ladies made her heart ache under its weight of fat. Nor did she know how to offer Miss Caroline money, though her handkerchief was heavy with it.
So Melisse sent the money in her handkerchief to Hannibal, smoothing it flat on her aproned lap, while Gram, disapproving of all that wasteful indulgence, wrote the letter that would enclose it. It was she who read Hannibal’s letters to Melisse. Miss Josephine listened, though seeming not to, and envied Hannibal his Gulliver’s travels, and thought about Hannibal, and thought more and more about Hannibal, there being no one else and nothing else to engage her mind.
When the heaviness around Melisse’s heart choked her heart and killed her, the money under her mattress was tied up and sent to Hannibal, with Gram not even considering taking a penny to pay the postage that cost her more than she spent on stamps in a year.
After Hannibal’s letter of acknowledgment, there was no more reason for him to write. He had not inquired for Miss Josephine, not knowing if it was seemly. He had not written anything on which Miss Josephine could dream. It was as if the end of Melisse was the end of everything.
Miss Josephine gave up, was in bed more than she was
out of it. No one knew what ailed her. The tiny annuity Gram had, from Papa’s sole investment outside of the South, went into medicines that did not help. That check, two hundred dollars, that did not stretch and could not stretch, but had to stretch over twelve long months, was swallowed up in fretful sickness.
The prophecy renewed itself. There was only one thing in Miss Josephine’s life: death by slow starvation, complicated by cancer of the soul.
T
he day Melisse was laid to rest, Hannibal was taking his teacher’s exam, praying he would pass it for his mother’s sake, not knowing she was already dead for his sake, her drowned heart no longer pumping to keep up with the schedule of cooking and catering that had filled her old kerchief with paper money.
When Melisse lay dying, Gram sat by her side holding her hand, just as Papa had held so many dying colored hands, performing his last duty, his divine duty to those slaves who had served him long and faithfully.
Melisse, meeting death tranquilly because her work on earth, the education of her son, had been well done, did not want Hannibal to know that she was dying, or told that she
was dead until the earth was over her, and wanted no midnight telegram knocking at his frightened door, but a letter, written gentle, saying that this was how she would have it, herself remembered alive, not dead, strong, not stricken, walking the earth, not under it.
Perhaps it was Melisse, the undying in her passed on to Hannibal, who guided his hand when he wrote his exam, though her own hand had never mastered a written word nor had her eye comprehended one. Yet she was born to be what she never got to be: a scholar. She loved the feel of books, the printed page, wanting knowledge for the sake of knowing.
When she was six and freedom day came, she jumped up and down on an old stump, laughing, and crying, and shouting, ‘I’se free, “I’se free,” then knelt by that stump to pray that Massa would let her go to learning school. But freedom left her without a master, and her mammy thought schooling was for white folks with soft hands. Melisse was taught to cook instead, and she did it well because she would have done well at anything.